Hi Daniel,
It wasn't deliberate, but I did notice it as well... Unfortunately I just ran out of time and haven't had a chance to revisit it yet. (Keep on me - as you've seen it eventually works

)
As for the 1%, I wonder if it was a problem with temp space or something? (I.E. GD overwriting it's own temp files since it was being called so frequently in succession...)
Did the eventually generate or were they just "bad thumbnails?"